SER Analysis of Spatial Modulation and PLNC‐Based Multicast Relay Network in mmWave Communications

ABSTRACT Millimeter‐wave (mmWave) communication has wide applications in 5G broadband cellular communication, wireless backhaul connections, wireless personal area networks, vehicular area networks, and mobile ad hoc networks. Major issues in using mmWave communication for multicasting are blockage and penetration losses in signal propagation. To overcome these losses, the proposed system model includes decode‐and‐forward (DF) relay nodes between source and destination nodes in the multicast network. The performance of the relay network is further improved by adopting physical layer network coding (PLNC) at the relay node. In addition, spatial modulation (SM) is adopted as a modulation technique due to its inherent advantage of improved spectral efficiency. In this paper, a multicast relay network using SM and PLNC in mmWave communications is proposed for indoor line‐of‐sight (LoS) environments. The error performance analysis of the proposed system is investigated in terms of deriving analytical expressions by considering orthogonal channel conditions among the nodes. The overall end‐to‐end pairwise error probability (PEP) and symbol error rate (SER) performances of the proposed system are derived from the performances at the links between the source nodes to relay and destination nodes during the first time slot and relay nodes to destination nodes during the second time slot. The advantage of the PLNC‐based system is identified by comparing it with the non‐PLNC‐based multicast system. Analytical results are compared with Monte Carlo simulations.